BP Unfiltered

The Four Who Voted Against Trout for ROY

Mike Trout won the Sporting News Rookie of the Year award, which is voted on by players. There were 92 votes. Trout got...88 of them. Four players voted for somebody other than Trout for Rookie of the Year.

Two went to Darvish. I'm willing to allow that some players simply don't follow baseball, aren't really that into baseball, don't really know much about baseball, and only play it because of the money and fame. Those guys might genuinely look at a pitcher's stats, and a hitter's stats, and have no idea how to square the two. They might see that Yu Darvish got a bunch of "wins," and that Mike Trout didn't get any "wins," and figure, hey, wins are the name of the game. The name of the game is actually baseball, but these guys are confused about the name of the game. Anyway, so they vote for Darvish. It's lololololol but whatever.

But two went to Cespedes. And that one's harder to fathom, not because Trout is better than Cespedes (he's better than Darvish, and everybody) but because I can't figure out what those two votes would be representing. What did those two voters look at to convince themselves? I'm truly, truly curious about this. So OK since they're not looking at WARP,

So there are two possibilities: these two players voted exclusively on outfield assists. Or they (and the two Darvish voters) are the four hitters who had home runs stolen by Trout this year, and they're still bitter. The only two possibilities. Don't leave your other possibilities in the comments, because there are none*.

*unless there's some rule that players can't vote for their own teammates; checking on that now, though the Sporting News article itself expresses surprise that it wasn't a unanimous vote

The second is that Sam was setting us up with his lines "The only two possibilities. Don't leave your other possibilities in the comments, because there are none*." and then the asterisk goes to an aside about a rule about not voting for your teammates. A bold statement/prediction, indeed.

And what prevents a team from voting for their own rookies regardless of who had the best rookie season in the league?

Also, with 92 votes in a 14 team league that means some teams must have more votes than other teams since 92 doesn't divide into 14 evenly. Does that mean that some teams can weight their own rookies more heavily?

This just serves to confirm the suspicion that in all award voting there is noise. There will responses that don't seem to make any objective sense when judging them against the stated criteria. No matter what you do some people will vote for the Monkey Rodeo option. They will punch their hanging chad for Lyndon LaRouche. Just because they can.

maybe they were just cognizant of trout winning it and decided to give recognition to a couple of teammates or guys they just wanted to show respect for; two foreigners getting props isn't gonna ruin the landscape